Sri Lanka experiences a series of cyberattacks

Sri Lanka is not a common victim of attackers (well, at least in comparison with the US…) Still, this May, it fell victim of attackers several times

The Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Readiness Team (SLCERT) reveals that a group of malefactors performed attacks on a number of Sri Lankan websites, including websites of other countries, such as Kuwait Embassy in Colombo, the Tea Research Institute in Talawakelle, the Rajarata University in Mihintale. Dileepa Lathsara, the CEO of TechCERT commented the incident and said that the attackers affected vulnerable websites equipped with poor cybersecurity measures. Lathsara stressed that most of the attacked websites were restored and the proprietors were urged to enhance the security of their websites.

Laredo is dealing with consequences of attack

The City of Laredo experienced a cyberattack last week that left the citizens in the dark

A spokesperson for the city said that specialists are currently working to recover from the consequences of the internet. Luckily, the majority of city services and operations did not suffer, but the city’s IT team is striving to get the city’s legal department back in service. For this reason, the legal correspondence and public information requests will supposed to remain unavailable until connections can be restored. The city has already restored the online payment system.

Several US cities became affected at the same time

Wolters Kluwer software company experienced a devastating malware attack on May 7. On the same day, the city government of Baltimore became victim of a ransomware, a malicious software that is designed to lock down computers until the attacked organization pays a demanded ransom fee.

The incident took place several weeks ago and some services still remain down, the technology outage shut down many critical systems. “I think anybody that tells you now they think they know in some actuarial way either what [the] general experience is like in the future, or what the worst case can be, is kidding themselves,” Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said last year.

Data of HCL employees and clients is exposed

The information belonging to one of employees of the digital solutions firm HCL was left accessible. The leakage was discovered by UpGuard when it noticed personal information and plaintext passwords for new hires, reports on installations of customer infrastructure, and web applications for managing personnel.

With the help of a keyword search techniqueUpGuard researchers came across the file on various HCL domains. “Whereas a typical data exposures involves one collection of data, either in a single storage bucket or database, in this case the data was spread out across multiple subdomains and had to be accessed through a web UI. These constraints expanded the scope of analysis and limited the speed with which the analyst could access the data,” UpGuardsaid.